PPS brings unparalleled experience, expertise, and past performance history to FSA. PPS is the current incumbent of the EAI/ITA and SA project and we are intimately familiar with the existing SA suite of products and have successfully designed, implemented the current SA and successfully integrated four FSA applications. PPS works together with FSA as a seamlessly integrated organization and shares common goals and objectives to meet and exceed expectations.

Security Architecture - Based on our SA Tivoli training, experience, and expertise, ITA and EAI experience and expertise as well as our in-depth experience and knowledge FSA’s current systems, applications, environment, processes and procedures, we are confident that the team and the technical solution we offer will ensure the successful on-time and within budget completion of this effort. Our technical approach is based on “tried-and-true” TIM and TAM integration life cycle.

E-Authentication - The E-authentication initiative has been established as part of the President’s management agenda to enable trust and confidence in E-Government transactions. A federation based E-Authentication model facilitates the establishment of trust associations among Service Providers (SP) and Identity Providers (IdP) in addition to providing assertion based authentication. PPS's approach has the architectural framework of a federation based E-authentication system based on Shibboleth, a cost-effective open source solution that is widely deployed in academic settings such as colleges and universities. The proposed design solution takes into consideration the existing Security Architecture (SA) that is currently in place at the Federal Student Aid office. Recently, PPS successfully designed and implemented an e-Authentication solution at the Social Security Administration (SSA). Our SSA e-Authentication solution was successfully by the General Services Administration Interoperability Lab for compliance and compatibility.

ESB TPOC - An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an integration architecture that integrates Service Oriented applications. An ESB is constructed using middleware technologies, standards, and tools. Some of the primary functions of an ESB are transport of data and service invocations between applications, transformation of data, workflow orchestration, and service registration and discovery. The ESB will provide the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) services required to integrate Federal Student Aid applications. Accordingly, the ESB will provide the reliable and manageable application interconnectivity services required to facilitate implementation and use of shared services and to guarantee timely access to accurate shared data. As part of the FSA target state vision, future applications will be implemented based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) patterns.